


We Could be Immortals

by Magical_Awesome_Kid



Category: Big Hero 6 (2014)
Genre: But not in the typical sense, Deep thought, Gen, Immortality
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-01
Updated: 2015-02-01
Packaged: 2018-03-09 22:43:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,144
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3267089
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Magical_Awesome_Kid/pseuds/Magical_Awesome_Kid
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Finally, he reached the grave he was headed for, one with freshly-laid dirt still damp from the rain. However, another figure also stood over the grave, this one tall with broad shoulders, a strong jaw that was partially hidden under the scarf he wore and the simple jacket and slacks he was decked in. He looked at the gravestone with eyes mixed of emotions.</p><p>	Hiro opened his mouth. “You’re an idiot, nerd.”</p><p>	The figure turned, fully exposing his face as a smirk overtook his features, identical brown eyes boring back into Hiro. “Says the bonehead himself.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	We Could be Immortals

            Aunt Cass worried about her youngest nephew so dearly. She’d seen him moments after the fire, in some sort of trance as he just stared into the inferno. He sat at the edge of one of the emergency vehicles, a nurse with him, but he was so unresponsive even as Aunt Cass hugged him. He finally moved when she had asked the nurse where her eldest nephew had gone.

            “Tadashi’s in there.” Hiro’s words were horse, almost like he was holding back something.

            Since that moment, Cass had grieved, but she had tried to hold it together for Hiro’s sake. She organized a funeral, with them burying ashes from the fire as no body was ever recovered, just a burned blazer and some trainers (chemicals, they had said, could have burned hot enough to incinerate him, they said). Cass tried not to break down at the explanation of the investigators, but she had cried into Moochi’s fur that night.

            Hiro was quiet that week, though. He had no energy, none of his normal life, as his whole complexion seemed to grey. For the three days between the fire and the funeral, he said nothing to no one, shed no tears for Cass to see, and was utterly unresponsive as he climbed the stairs to his bedroom in his slacks.

            It was only long after the last of Tadashi’s friends had left that she had gone to check on Hiro, hoping that her youngest was alright. She walked up the stairs slowly as she called, “Hiro? Are you ok, sweetie?”

            She reached the top, but what met her was not a young teen, but an open window to the street, suit thrown to the side, and a familiar backpack gone.

            Cass yelled out, looking frantically for the boy, until she found a note attached to the bed.

            _I’ll let you know._

            Cass clung the words to her, hoping, as the sun finally broke through the clouds, that her boy was alright.

* * *

            Hiro had been quiet since the explosion. No words escaped his mouth, no snark rolled off his tongue, and no sass met the ears. Instead, he was almost an automaton, as believed by the viewers, as he wore his favorite outfit in the streets. His sneakers squeaked against the sidewalk as the last sun rays of the day finally broke through. He had a heavy backpack on his back that, to anyone else his size, should have been dragged down by.

            Instead, he finished his path down the desolate roads until he found his way back to the cemetery. Without thinking, he passed a number of ancient graves towards the newer, casting but a glance to the few he passed…

            _Henry… Milo… Satoshi… 1804… 1942… 2001…_

            Finally, he reached the grave he was headed for, one with freshly-laid dirt still damp from the rain. However, another figure also stood over the grave, this one tall with broad shoulders, a strong jaw that was partially hidden under the scarf he wore and the simple jacket and slacks he was decked in. He looked at the gravestone with eyes mixed of emotions.

            Hiro opened his mouth. “You’re an idiot, nerd.”

            The figure turned, fully exposing his face as a smirk overtook his features, identical brown eyes boring back into Hiro. “Says the bonehead himself.”

            The teen smiled, truly, for the first time in days as he sprinted forward and brought the man into a hug. He returned it just as fiercely as the boy shook his head. “I really thought you bit the big one this time, Tadashi.” Hiro commented to his older brother as the elder shook his head.

            “Nah, it just took a lot longer to recover.” The two broke as Tadashi nodded his head off to the side where a small set of benches under a tree sat. The tree had kept the rain off, so they were relatively dry. “Let’s sit. I’m still not 100%.” He noted as he slung an arm over his brother. Sure enough, Tadashi walked with a slight limp still, but he had Hiro to lean on in the mean time.

            Only when they sat and Hiro was sure his brother wasn’t going to topple did the teen unzip his bag, revealing sandwiches that he had snuck away from the café. “You had a lot of people there today.” Hiro commented as he gave his brother a sandwich, Tadashi taking without pause. “That nerd gang of yours was crushed.”

            Tadashi winced as he bit into his sandwich. “Yeah, I got really attached this time around. Couldn’t help it, though.” He smirked to his brother. “You got attached, too.”

            Hiro rolled his eyes as he took a much larger bite of his sandwich, leaving most for Tadashi as the young man had to be starving. “Eat your sandwich. Regeneration had to bite.”

            Tadashi shivered as he rubbed his arm. “Did it. That chemical thing? It did a number on me. Barely got out before the fire brigade came through.”

            Hiro swallowed his bite. “Find Callaghan?”

            Tadashi gripped his sandwich tighter as part broke off and fell to the ground. “Yeah, stealing your micro-bots.” Tadashi scowled before a sigh escaped his throat. “Figures, and this time no one had to find out our little secret before they tried to kill us, your bot-figthing not counting.”

            Hiro rolled his eyes as he waved his brother off. “That was for the kicks. Seriously, this life has got to be the coolest tech yet. I haven’t been this not-bored since the Enlightenment.” Hiro noted before shaking his head. “And only you would refer to our immortality as a ‘little’ secret.”

            Hiro was slightly off, but Tadashi wasn’t going to correct him. It wasn’t so much that the boys had lived one long life, but hundreds of smaller ones. Earliest memories they had dated back to pre-Mesopotamia, in the land that would become Japan. They had been born brothers with clean souls, but, with every natural death, the two would be reborn again, different bodies and times, but the same brothers nonetheless. By the time they could solidly form memories, the two would begin to recall past lives until it became synonymous with their current ones. However, if anything tried to kill them before the natural end, then they would recover in time to the same way they were.

            But Immortality wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. With every regeneration, there were people out to kill the brothers, wanting what they had for themselves. Never dying before your time, never truly seeing the other side, all things people wanted and the two had. While not all memories of the pasts had been good, the two together were a force to be recon with.

Hiro couldn’t help but grin as he thought of times long past. “They still are using my star charts, by the way.”

            Tadashi smirked as he turned to his brother. “Of course.” He nodded. “And they still read my books…”

            “…which make no sense.” Hiro cut in as he shot a look to his elder brother. “They sucked. Stick to robots.”

            “Thanks, really.” Tadashi threw back before he sat back, sandwich momentarily forgotten. He seemed to be lost in thought about something or other.

            Hiro looked out as the sun broke through, drying off the grave stones and casting light upon the Earth. Finally, Hiro looked to his brother once more. “Hey, Tadashi?” Hiro asked, using the name that was not his brother’s name and yet it was. At some point through their past lives, they had agreed to just adopt the names they were born with rather than using the names and dialects long gone.

            “Hm?” Tadashi looked over to the younger as he sat straight.

            “What now?” Hiro questioned. It was a relatively simple question in terms of the English used, but the implications were so much greater.

            Tadashi sighed. He knew what Hiro meant. When one of them hadn’t died as others expected, they had to up and leave, live their unnatural lives out elsewhere until they died normally, usually in their late 60s to around 100 depending on the era and genetic health. Otherwise, someone got suspicious, someone asked the wrong questions, and someone, one of them, ended up on the dissection table.

            Tadashi shivered in memory.

            At the same time, however, this had been one of the longest stretches of time yet also the shortest in a long time. No one had gotten suspicious in the last half a century, not since the forties and fifties when everything was a conspiracy.  Even by then, Hiro and Tadashi had been over the middle hump, survivors of the world war, and they knew that the end was close. When natural death had taken them, they’d been reborn some time later in their current bodies, no recollection of the middle time.

            This was, however, the shortest, too. Tadashi hadn’t bit the big one this young in a while, but he’d let his need to protect get the better of him. Hiro was fourteen. He hadn’t had his own skin with death this young since the dark ages.

            Tadashi rubbed the bridge of his nose. It wasn’t just those facts, but it was also that the two had gotten attached. Cass was as much their family as any of their other moms and aunts and caregivers stretching back the decades. Tadashi and Hiro had made friends in people who understood the world in the way they did, who saw it for how much more it could be. One would think that generations would have worn on the boys, but it really just showed them, over and over, how much humans strived to survive and thrive.

            There was so much more to them, and, in all those years, they’d barely scratched the surface.

            Tadashi let his hand fall as he looked to his brother, wide eyes brown in question and edge. He, too, must have been thinking all of this. “I… I need to think. Think of a cover for all of this.” Tadashi explained as he leaned back forward before mushing his brother’s hair. “We’ll figure it out, Otouto.”

            Hiro let his brother mess with his hair for once. It was a small comfort to the two of them. “Whatever you say, nii-san. Need any help?”

            “I’ll take what I can get.” Tadashi replied. “I’ve got the safe house for now, but, as soon as we come up with something good, I’ll ‘come back from the dead.’” Tadashi smiled at their personal joke. “I’m just glad no one actually found me.”

            “Lucky you.” Hiro smirked as the hand fell away. “Too bad. I was kind of liking having my own room again.”

            Tadashi grasped his shirt dramatically. “What? And here I thought you cared!”

            The teen, of course, threw back his own sass. “Yeah, it was really _burning_ me up inside.”

            “Har har, fire jokes.” Tadashi rolled his eyes. “We’ve already gotten to the jokes?”

            “We’ve done the last ones to death.” Hiro defended with a completely straight face. Tadashi retaliated by taking his brother into a headlock and messing with his hair.

            It would be a month before Tadashi, on the sly, found more on the micro-bot theft.  Hiro would try to take things into his own hands, of course, but their friends had done wonders to save his ass (even if he could survive everything). Their superhero go had been what finally brought down the Kabuki man, Robert Callaghan of all people, and he was thrown into custody.

            It was after this that Tadashi Hamada made a miraculous appearance back from the dead. He explained that he’d seen Callaghan steal the micro-bots and, in fear for his family’s lives and the injuries he sustained, he ran away to figure out how to stop the man he saw as a mentor. Tadashi had plenty of sob-story in him, but his reappearance was met with nothing but hugs and laughs. The news covered him for a day before, a few weeks later, everything had settled back into the old ways. Tadashi took back his lab even though Hiro was determined to build his own fort of a lab within the personal lab. The others never pushed Tadashi on anything, just glad their best friend was alive to be with them.

            All the while, Hiro and Tadashi smiled and laughed along, never once dropping a hint that they had been planning this. Never once did Hiro drop that he’d believed his brother really gone. After the first shave with death, the two managed to stay well enough out of trouble. They were guarded for a year, but once the two were sure no one would question, the Hamada bros went on to live their lives to the fullest.

            After all, this one had to be one of the best.

**Author's Note:**

> Just a random thought that I wrote on. It's not my usual work, but I thought about it while listening to BH6 soundtracks on 8tracks, specifically _We Could Be Immortals_.
> 
> If anyone wants to use this idea, go for it! Otherwise, critique would be much appreciated!
> 
> Valete!


End file.
